I must confess, I rarely use any of the Gmail features that are advertised as being really great. The reason is that I have a Gmail account and I never log in to it. Instead, I download all of my Gmail into my Thunderbird email application. So things like a fancy UI, nice searching, etc,…

Last week, a write on at the Guardian wrote an article that he never bothers to hide his email address. He publishes it on his website for all to see and he doesn’t think that it matters all that much. Hiding his email address has little incremental value of not receiving any more spam than…

The Associated Press has run a story today about an anti-spam crusader by the name of Daniel Balsam who makes his living by suing spammers. Here’s some excerpts from the article: Man quits job, makes living suing e-mail spammers Daniel Balsam hates spam. Most everybody does, of course. But he has acted on his hate…

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how I got a free offer from American Express wherein if I subscribed to a magazine, they would provide me with a buy-one-get-one free airline ticket. I thought that this sounded too good to be true so I wondered what the catch was. I checked the Terms…

Remember the ZeuS and money mule operation that the FBI, working in conjuction with authorities in the Ukraine, the Netherlands, and the UK brought down in September? The FBI has a nice graphic that illustrates how the operation works. Here’s a link to the image which is contained within a pdf, but I am reposting…

The New York Times (publishing on Yahoo Finance) recently posted an article about how email is getting a makeover and how the communication medium is being shunned by the younger crowd as they move more and more towards other platforms. If you like using email, that means you’re an old fogey. When the Internet exploded…

Microsoft has released its next edition of its Security Essentials tool. From InformationWeek: Without fanfare, on Thursday Microsoft released version 2 of its Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) antivirus software. The software is free for individuals and small businesses with up to 10 PCs. The new version of the software, which recently went through a four-month…

The release of numerous documents on Wikileaks this past year has caused a major uproar all throughout the press. To many on the libertarian right, and on the left as well, Julian Assange (founder of Wikileaks) is a hero because he has unmasked numerous secrets that the US government was hiding. In order to maintain…

In case you had missed it, social media site Gawker, along with its affiliates Gizmodo, Lifehacker, and Jezebel, recently was the victim of a security breach. Sometime over the past month, a hacking group by the name of Gnosis broke into Gawker and over the weekend and stole the email address and password information for…

While I was out traveling, WikiLeaks revealed a bunch of other documents that contained conversations of American diplomats and their assessments of other countries’ foreign leaders. But one revelation that I found particularly interesting is that documents revealed that China’s Politburo (the political branch of the Chinese Communist Party) was the one responsible for ordering…

I received this request from a member of the team I work in to post this survey request on my blog. If you, the reader, could have a gander and answer the survey if you are so inclined, I would appreciate it. You don’t have to be a Forefront user in order to take the…

From time to time, I get asked about what to do if your Hotmail account credentials are stolen and is being used to send out spam. Here is a paraphrased response that someone from the Windows Live Safety team said on an internal thread, but it applies to anyone. Here are the general steps we…

Back in October at the Virus Bulletin conference, I presented on the topic entitled “The Psychology of Spamming.” Specifically, it was a research project designed to look at our cognitive processes. I won’t go into the full details here (I will point a link to my paper and/or slide deck), but basically, humans can be…